Monday, February 4, 2013

And On The Ninth Day, God Made A Charlatan

I took a lot of heat last night for being less than
thrilled with the Dodge
television commercial featuring excerpts from Paul Harvey’s 1978 “So,
God Made A Farmer” speech, originally delivered to the Future Farmers Of
America. My point was – and still is – with its over-the-top hagiography of
rural folk, it came across as yet another version of Some Americans Are Better
Than Others. In fact, it sounded eerily like Sarah
Palin’s “real America” comment from the 2008 presidential election:

We believe that the best of America
is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little
pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard
working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.
This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday
Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and
growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us
in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.

It’s not that I disagree with the basic sentiment
embodied in Paul Harvey’s idyllic tract – that farmers are extraordinarily
hardworking people who are worthy of admiration. That’s certainly true. What I
object to is Harvey’s, and by extension, the Dodge ad’s, formulation of that
otherwise benign sentiment. Harvey’s words are so extreme, so laudatory, it’s hard not
to think the real meaning is: Rural folks are better than the rest of us.

God said, “I need
somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to
yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-comb pullets, who will stop his
mower for an hour to splint the leg of a meadowlark.”

Really? This is something farmers do on a regular
basis?

Yes, of course, it’s poetic license and all that;
but this is a speech Harvey gave in 1978, not 1878. I spent a lot of time
around farm kids when I was in college in downstate Illinois just a few years
after Harvey delivered that speech. I recall a lot of stories about things like
artificial insemination and the high-priced bull semen trade (yes, that’s a
thing); but not a single one about splinting lame songbirds in the meadow.

But I digress.

What rankles me most about the Dodge ad featuring
Harvey’s speech is that it comes at a time when the urban/rural divide is
perhaps more pronounced that it’s ever been. It’s not just red states versus
blue states anymore; it’s red counties versus blue counties. And conservatives exploit that divide for
political gain. I have to listen to this every day: They vilify the city I was
born in just because the country’s first African American president began his
career here. They cheered when Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer
Olympics. They trot out ghoulish statistics about our murder rate, not because
they give a damn about the innocent African American and Latino children who’ve
died here, but because it reminds their base exactly who lives here.

If you think I take this personally, let me tell
you: you’re goddamn right I do. I love my city every bit as much as a farmer
loves a plot of land that’s been in his or her family since before the Civil
War. And it’s wrong – just plain wrong – to elevate the experiences of one
group of Americans over the experiences of other groups of Americans, to say
that the farmer’s experience is one iota better or more valuable than the
factory worker’s, or the teacher’s, or the cop’s. It’s just plain wrong to say that
the farmer’s struggle is better or harder or nobler than any of their
struggles, or the struggles of immigrants who endured mind-boggling hardship to
get here. It’s more obscene still to suggest the that the farmer’s struggle is
better or harder or nobler than the struggles of Native Americans or the
descendants of African slaves, many of whom live outside those parts of the
country Sarah Palin called “real America.”

Make no mistake about it: When conservatives talk
about “real America,” when they heap disproportionate praise on farmers and
rural folk, and disproportionate scorn on Chicago and New York and Los Angeles,
they’re speaking in code. They’re trying to divide us, and they think we’re too
dumb to figure it out. We’re not, of course, and they’re pretty dumb to think
so. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals football coach Dennis Green: They’re
saying exactly what we thought they’d say.

By now you’re thinking, What does any of this
have to do with Paul Harvey? He just gave a speech about the nobility of
farmers, and a part of it was used in a TV commercial. What’s the big deal?

And you’re right. He just gave a speech about the
nobility of farmers, and if that was all there was to it, I wouldn’t be wasting
your time. But (and you may see where this is going) … here’s the rest of
the story.

Paul Harvey was the original right-wing talk radio
huckster. Silver-tongued though he may have been, the substance of his message
could just as easily have come from the mouths of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
On Harvey’s death in 2009, The
New York Times observed:

He railed against
welfare cheats and defended the death penalty. He worried about the national
debt, big government, bureaucrats who lacked common sense, permissive parents,
leftist radicals and America succumbing to moral decay. He championed rugged
individualism, love of God and country, and the fundamental decency of ordinary
people.

Indeed, it should come as no surprise that one of
Harvey’s more famous jeremiads, his “If I Were The Devil”
bit, made its way onto Herman Cain’s
website just last year. Close your eyes and tell me you don’t hear Glenn
Beck’s voice when you read these words:

If
I were the devil I would encourage schools to refine young intellects, but
neglect to discipline emotions — just let those run wild, until before you knew
it, you’d have to have drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors at every
schoolhouse door.

Within a decade I’d have
prisons overflowing, I’d have judges promoting pornography — soon I could evict
God from the courthouse, then from the schoolhouse, and then from the houses of
Congress. And in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion,
and deify science.

Of course, the piece isn’t just propaganda. It’s a
complete fraud. Evict God from the courthouse? If Harvey, a longtime resident
of nearby River Forest, Illinois (one of Chicago’s richest suburbs) had ever
set foot in a Cook County courtroom, he might have seen the words “In God We
Trust” emblazoned on the wall. Like this, from the
Circuit Court of Cook County website:

Evicted God from the schools? A damnable lie. All
the courts have ever done is to prevent public school teachers and
administrators – government employees – from forcing religion on their students.
Again, if Paul Harvey knew anything about the public schools in his own town, he’d know that Illinois public school students
are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance – with the words, “One nation,
under God” – every single day. See105
ILCS 5/27-3.

But Paul Harvey never was the kind of pundit who
let facts interfere with the narrative. Back in 1997, Fairness
& Accuracy In Reporting documented his casual relationship with the
truth, summarizing it this way:

If Harvey were just telling cutesy
tall tales, his lackadaisical attitude toward fact might be more easily
dismissed as harmless. But much of his news consists of stories re-cast into
Harvey’s conservative mold, presenting a world under attack by welfare
recipients, big government and labor.

And that’s what bothers me about the use of Harvey’s “So, God Made A Farmer”
speech in a television commercial in these divisive times. It’s
really not a paean to the salt of the earth; it’s just another chapter in Paul Harvey’s Masterworks Of Right-Wing Hackery.